Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/250

ÆT. 37] pen. and he said after a few words of chat, 'Now you see, I'm going to write poetry, so you'll have to cut. I'm sorry, but it can't be helped.' So I cut; and I have a notion that I know what he wrote that evening, as next Saturday when I turned up as I always did, he read us a lot of the story of Psyche. I recollect his remarking that it was very hard work writing that sort of thing. I took it he was speaking of the thrashing Psyche gets at the hands of Venus. He really felt for her, and was evidently glad it was over."

But even when writing poetry he was by no means intolerant of interruption. Some years later Miss Mary De Morgan, when staying at Kelmscott Manor, came one day into the tapestry room, and found him alone there, busy writing at a side table. Seeing his occupation by the look of the manuscript, she was turning to leave the room again, when he called out to her, "Where are you going, Mary?" "I thought you were busy writing poetry," she said. "What the devil has that got to do with it?" he cheerfully replied. "Sit down and tell me a tale."

But while he found perpetual amusement in his work, his amusements had always a strong element of seriousness. "At my first visit," Mr. William De Morgan notes—this was at Red Lion Square in 1864—"I chiefly recollect his dressing himself in vestments and playing on a regal, to illustrate points in connection with stained glass. As I went home it suddenly crossed my mind as a strange thing that he should, while doing what was so trivial and almost grotesque, continue to leave on my memory so strong an impression of his power—he certainly did, somehow." And this was true of all his diversions. Another friend of his who had been staying a few days with him was asked, after he came away, what they had talked